


The Answer

by WhisperDan



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Drabble, Established Relationship, M/M, Relationship Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:35:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23084878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhisperDan/pseuds/WhisperDan
Summary: The answer is that there isn't one.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 6
Kudos: 124





	The Answer

Derek Hale has secrets like a squirrel has more caches for winter than they know what to do with. He knew that going in. Well, he didn’t _know_ it, know it, but he had been prepared for whatever explosives might be buried long after no one else went looking for them. And there are plenty so far; not all of them horrible.

Derek hides things that he breaks, for instance, and sometimes within the hour, it’s replaced before Stiles can notice. (Except that there’s nothing Stiles doesn’t notice). Derek can’t stand the sound of the bedroom door opening at night even if it just means Stiles can’t sleep or has to take a piss. Derek pushes himself too hard, beats himself up for failing, turns simple tasks into a nightmare of movement if the outcome isn’t perfect. They’re not huge problems and if a real fight emerges from them, the volume never gets too loud and usually they can figure it out together.

He also hides things about himself. That one hurts, not because Derek is trying to do it or because omission often dances along the line of lying, but because Stiles thought he already knew everything there was to know. He had convinced himself that he could take care of Derek better than the man could take care of himself and its stupidest assumption he could have made. It all looked so straight forward from the outside, but he had forgotten all of the little, nettling ways trauma invaded a person’s experience. It wasn’t so different from what was left of Hale House; windows, doors and drywall were reasonably easy to replace, but the pipes were charred and the wiring all curled and melted. The living energy that made a house more than a box on a hill was damaged in ways that he couldn’t understand unless the whole thing came apart.

That place was condemned, but Derek Hale wasn’t, he was still everything that mattered. He didn’t need to start again, he needed to be retaught how to exist in a world with no war and no loneliness.

So, Stiles doesn’t feel great about tailing him. It’s not a control thing – or so he reminds himself every couple of minutes – it’s field research.

“I didn’t know Derek does yoga,” Isaac whispers.

Stiles did. He found out when he moved into the loft after the renovations were finished and he tripped over Derek’s mat while unpacking. He chews on his thumb nail. Derek would have told him eventually; he believes that and blames the chaos of lugging all their shit to and from a storage unit for the lapses in their communication. It had been a hasty decision that he move in, in the first place.

_What if you stayed?_

_What if I stayed?_

It was all very gross and romantic, but then life kicked in and logistics and hour-long forays into navigating the California DMV website and the US Postal Service’s and so on.

“You think asses like Derek Hale’s just spring out of the ground? Do you think they grow on trees, Isaac? Do you think they burst off a cob?”

Issac cringes. Good. Fucking pack with they’re over-sharing and spontaneous nudity. Something about Stiles and Derek together makes all of them cringe as if they’re four-year-olds and can’t stand to watch Dad and Dad kiss. Which is insane because there is literally nothing hotter on this earth than Stiles banging his boyfriend. His boyfriend who crushes Vinyasa yoga and has the fourth agricultural metaphor of asses. Thank whatever deity is presiding for the studio having so many walls of windows and for the popularization of men’s leggings.

“When are we going to have lunch?” sighs Isaac, melancholic, phone-scrollingly. He’s even wearing this absurd cowl-neck sweater he knows irks the shit out of Stiles because it’s not _technically_ a scarf, but it’s damn close enough. They live in northern California not fucking Maine. Speaking of, this had never occurred to him before, but honestly, Isaac’s a Stephen King character IRL and no one can convince him otherwise.

“Later.”

He feels Isaac’s eyes going around the car, out the windows and then coming back to land on him. “Hate to break it to you-,”

“No, you don’t; you _love_ to break it to me-,”

“Derek’s not that interesting.”

“I brought you for your ears not your opinion.”

“He’s not cheating on you.”

Stiles snorts. As if he’d drag them both out here at the ass crack of dawn for something as mundane as cheating. Dating someone that looks like Derek requires a hell of a thick skin and just a stupid amount of self-esteem, both of which Stiles has in abundance, so suck on that freshman-year-homecoming-dance-he-was-too-afraid-to-go-to. Besides, if Isaac knows Derek isn’t cheating on him, then it must be pretty blatantly fucking obvious.

“Of the two of us, you think _Derek_ would do the cheating?” he scoffed.

“That’s fucked up.”

“No, really, you think _Derek Hale_ has the capacity for cheating? On a person? On a human, living person that is alive on this planet?”

“God. Stop.”

“That’s what I thought,” and Stiles brings his binoculars back to his eyes. Derek. Cheating. Sure. No, they were on a far more important mission than that; just a totally regular, non-controlling, tail that involves some long-range viewing equipment. The telescopic lens in the trunk is really just for show. And emergencies. And bird watching, actually.

Derek’s class is about an hour of twanging the rubber bands on his wrist and drumming the steering wheel impatiently.

Eventually Isaac grumbles, “This car smells like weed.”

“That’s because Scott smokes a fuckton of weed in it, SHHH _SHHHHUT_ , QUIETSHUDDUP!” Stiles wildly slaps at his passenger, batting at him frantically until they are both slumped in their seats and just barely peeking over the dash. Derek materializes outside of the studio, stopping long enough to down some Gatorade like he’s starring in a commercial for it all golden light and slow motion, bless him. He’s parked across the street and they wait until he’s behind the wheel before poking back up. Stiles starts the engine, grinds the shit out of the clutch because Scott’s car is ancient and hateful and then they are moving, following safely behind the Camaro by a few car lengths.

“This is starting to feel unhealthy.”

“I agree, we’re being very stealthy.”

“Stiles we’re sitting a foot apart, I know you know that’s not what I said.”

“Auto-correct.”

“I’m gonna tell him about this, but I’m sure you know that too.”

“Man, I didn’t believe him, but you do kind of have oldest child syndrome,” shoots Stiles and then he blows smoke off of his finger gun, “Listen here son, your dad and I-,”

“It’s creepy that you refer to the two of you that way, what with all the cumulative dead parents between us.”

“Your _dad_ and _I_ are going through a phase of personal discovery which requires a healthy dose of inter-relational espionage. He has perfect teeth, Isaac, why’s he spending so much money on a _dentist_?”

“Are you serious, that’s what this is about?”

“What else would it be about?”

This momentarily stumps Isaac; he goes through several eyebrow positions before landing close to grudging acceptance.

“Erroneous orthodontic bills and now this!”

“Now what? He’s literally just driving.”

“ _But where_? We passed the turn for home and Derek doesn’t like using public showers.”

“He’s a grown man, maybe he has errands.”

To this Stiles lets out an epic scoff (only moderately rehearsed; he’s perfectionist, not a sociopath), “Oh Isaac, OH ISAA –,”

“WHAT?”

They cruise to a stop at the next red light and there’s radio playing fuzzily in one of the cars around them; summer heat shimmers off the cluster of vehicles in a high-noon haze. Stiles takes advantage of the lull to whisper, “I’ve already done our errands for the week.” Stiles doesn’t do things half-assed. He does them full-assed. There may be some circles that would consider the situation he’s contrived over the last six days to be entrapment, only the goal isn’t to trap his boyfriend, the goal is to understand his boyfriend. Understanding means no fighting and no fighting means more opportunities for hot monkey sex and fun dinners and shit.

Plain and simple, he’s sick of the landmines. Ok? Fuck. He knew they were there, he still accepts that its part of the man he loves, but it’s fucking _stressful_. Derek is a finely ( _finely_ ) tuned machine, he measures the components of his meals in _grams_ , he goes to the gym every day but Thursdays – random, right? – his weight training routine is exactly forty-five minutes, he keeps protein bars stashed in every conceivable place on the off chance his misses a meal (of which there are five daily). These are not the rigors of an unfastidious man. He chewed Stiles out once for making dinner and including an unplanned, undiscussed side of glazed carrots. It was one of their bigger fights. Surface level and in hindsight, it sounds hilarious. It wasn’t. It still isn’t. And Stiles had once thought he could find the humor in _anything_.

He’ll do anything to keep things from devolving like that again. In fact, he’s going dig up these damn bombs before they can even go off. And in true Stiles fashion, he’s going to do it surgically.

“You’re a psycho.”

“Please, I’m type-A at best.”

“ _At best?_ "

“I guess it’s _‘psycho’_ to think critically and take notes now.” 

“It’s _psycho_ that you manipulated an entire series of events in order to follow Derek around town just to see what he’ll do! He’s not a guinea pig!”

“I just want to know how he thinks. Also, what, you think I _guessed_ you wanted that Miu Miu belt-bag for your birthday?” Isaac’s face pales, turns translucent really. “Oh, _come on_ , we’re adults, keeping a meticulously curated index of the pack’s likes, dislikes and personal interests is _not_ the weirdest thing you know I do.” 

Traffic begins moving again and that seems to shake Isaac’s sudden look of having caught a chill.

“I thought Derek was the screwed up one,” he says darkly. 

“It’s not screwed up to pay attention to people I care about. Ohmygod he’s turning, shit – we’re – HEY FUCK YOU, PAL – OH MY GOD REALLY? You’re not gonna let – ?! _Fuckingfucktoiletshit._ Hang on, I think I can U-ie up here.” Several questionably legal street maneuvers later, they’re darting across the parkway and into a restaurant parking lot. It’s an older place, or as old as places get in California. There’s a flicker in one of its neon signs. Cigarette butts sprinkle the foot of the curb.

“The Old Brogue,” Stiles reads aloud off the wood sign out front.

“I think my dad used to play pool here.”

“Weird.”

“It’s a pub.”

“Well observed, Watson.”

“What’s your problem with me, man?”

“Yoga and day-drinking? That’s. New.”

“He can’t get drunk.”

“Oh Isaac, OH I—,”

“ _Since_ when?”

Stiles grips the back of the headrest with bracketed fingers. It is possible that he wasn’t supposed to mention powdered wolfsbane in front of certain pack members. It was a talk Derek preferred to have with them when he thought they displayed enough self-control to handle it. An inexperienced, drunk lycanthrope wandering around town in full shift was a dead inexperienced drunk lycanthrope. And Isaac thought _Stiles_ was a control freak.

Stiles, unsurprisingly, does not agree with Derek on this matter. He concedes that the threat of danger is higher for underworld beings. Scott couldn’t go a week without stumbling into the crosshairs of someone happy to murder him and everyone he knew in the early days. Stiles gets it. This, the present, these days, however, are not the same. No more hunters, no more deranged animal spirits, no more sneakers ruined by blood splatter. Isaac and Erica shouldn’t have to earn their right to get trashed. All living things shared the inalienable right to get trashed. As Stiles’s grandmother used to say, “The first things every civilization invents are God and booze.”

Scott figured out all on his own that you could smoke wolfsbane powder too.

“Since what?”

“Since when can Derek get drunk? Werewolves can’t get drunk.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“You can’t hypnotize me; we _can_ drink, can’t we?”

“If you want a drink there’s water in the backseat.”

“Has it occurred to you that maybe Derek sneaks around sometimes because of this shit you’re pulling right now?”

“I don’t pull this shit with Derek. I have to get it out of my system during the day. I’m a pretty great boyfriend and you can’t be a great boyfriend without venting your self-destructive impulses outside the home.”

Isaac turned in his seat to look at Stiles, his seatbelt still on and whining as it reached. “Following him around is self-destructive, Stiles. What do you think he’s gonna do when he finds out?”

“Derek’s a freak, he’ll be cool with it.”

“The _fuck_ does that mean?”

“There’s really not a lot to interpret from what I said.”

Derek walks right back out the doors and Stiles’s mind quiets for a second. The pause is short, the pause is nearly non-existent. Derek’s not here to drink away his woes, but he does have their insulated food bag slung over his shoulder, the one he insists they use instead of plastic when he and Stiles get take-out. He gets in his car and starts to back out. Indecision time. Follow him or figure out what he bought inside.

Stiles throws the shifter into gear.

Derek Hale is looking for something. They shadow him to several locations. None of said locations actually divulge what it is he’s looking for. He stops at a park, roots around the picnic tables and the basketball court where he plays with a local dad-league. (Stiles isn’t allowed to call it that in front of him). He stops at the library, the grocery store, the post office and leaves again empty handed.

“He’s probably looking for his wallet or something,” suggests Isaac. He’s not hiding his intrigue. He can pretend Stiles is the only one complicit in what’s happening if he wants to but they both know he’s curious. How often do any of them get to observe Derek in the wild? He also did absolutely nothing to stop this.

The next place he leads them is the country club. Stiles refuses to use his membership under normal circumstances. They need it, apparently, because other alphas like to be entertained while visiting or passing through. Hospitality is a good way to take conflict off the table. They check in with the Hale pack and get treated to lunch, sauna, tennis and free drinks. Stiles hates that it works. The peacetime they get the privilege to experience owes its existence in part to this gilt compound stuffed to the rafters with class-traitors and the _bourgeoisie_. Derek stopped trying to get Stiles go with him once it became clear that even mention of The Club would trigger a ninety-minute tirade.

Scott’s beater car does not pass muster with the gate guy. Stiles takes his time blocking the entrance as he executes a twenty-three-point turn. They find parking on the street and once again wait.

“What happens when you’re done with this?” Isaac asks.

“Brunch? Texas Greg’s serves until like four, I like our odds.”

“So, you’re gonna contrive a scenario like this every time things aren’t going exactly the way you want?”

“Relationships take work, Isaac.”

“This. Isn’t. That.”

“How would you know?”

“ _Are_ you cheating on him?”

“ _Please._ ”

“Why did you even ask me to come if you don’t actually want to talk about any of this? You know this is problematic. I don’t think it’s about Derek, I think it’s about you.”

A knuckle knocks on Isaac’s window. Both of them nearly shit themselves. Derek’s eyebrow raises over the top of sunglasses. Stiles instantly and frantically extricates himself from the car while Isaac sinks in his seat, trying to will himself into the upholstery.

“Derek, I thought you had yoga today! What’re you doing here?!” Stiles laughs, leaning over the roof.

Derek says nothing. He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and hands it across the top of the car. There’s a text chain open, one between he, Erica, Boyd and Isaac. It details, with pictures, the last two hours of the Stiles and Isaac Stalking Tour.

“… the fuck.” Stiles wheels around and sure enough, Boyd’s Model X is parked a block away. Erica waves through the moonroof. This is… huh. Stiles mashes his face against his driver’s side window. Isaac is expertly not meeting his glare. To be fair, he did say he was going to tell Derek what was happening, Stiles was just too distracted realize that he wasn’t going to wait until they were done.

“What’s going on?” Derek asks so smugly, so calmly it hurts.

“You! What’s going on you! Why’re you here?!”

“I lost my retainer.”

“ _You’re what?_ ”

“Why are you following me, Stiles?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Stiles blusters shaking the phone at him, “Isaac has literally been narrating my every move. Since when do you wear a retainer?!”

“I should have mentioned it—,”

“You’re damn right you should have—,”

“What’d you get at that bar?!”

“… Lunch?”

“Are _you joking?_ ”

“What’s going on?” Derek repeated. He should be angrier than he’s acting. His reaction is sort of stumping Stiles. He knew it possibly this might end in a fight. Why the hell was _Stiles so pissed off_? Did he… want it to end in a fight? Sometimes he did.

He snaps, “I’m sick of not knowing what’s going on!”

“Then talk to me about it.”

“We talk _so much_ and it doesn’t make a fucking difference.”

“We can’t fix our problems in a weekend Stiles.”

“I’m not trying to fix everything—,”

“Then what are you doing?”

“ _I’m freaking out_ , ok? This is so hard, why is it so hard? I follow all the rules and shit still explodes in my face! You keep stuff from me—,”

“You keep things from me too,” Derek points out. Why is he _so calm_?

“Yeah, thanks, great I guess we’re even.”

“You’re mad at me.”

“No shit!”

“ _Why_?”

“Because I’m scared it’s not working out!”

“Do you want to break up with me?”

“No! Be more upset about this! I violated your privacy! We fought over me using your pillows and not re-fluffing them last week for three hours!”

“Relationships don’t just snap together, you can’t force things to be better,” Derek says slowly.

“The fuck I can’t.”

“You’ve never been in a long-term relationship.”

“ _So_?”

“So, you don’t have to be freaked out. We’re both difficult people to be with. You aren’t failing at anything, but I don’t think you have enough experience at this to decide it’s not working between us. Are you unhappy?”

“… No.”

“Neither am I.”

“RELATIONSHIPS AREN’T ROMANTIC COMEDIES,” shouts Erica from the end of the block. Because of course she can fucking hear them. And so can Boyd. And Scott if he tagged along, which seems likely.

“YES, THANK YOU ERICA, I’M AWARE,” Stiles yells.

“Are you?” asks Derek, “You spent all morning following me around because of the pressure you’re putting on yourself to come up with an answer to what, exactly?”

“Maybe I went a little overboard—,”

“You did.”

“You’re taking this uncomfortably well.”

“… It's not a big deal.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you mean to say you don’t mind being followed around because you’re kind of a freak and are into it?” Isaac’s gone beet-red in the passenger seat. He’s trying very hard to focus on his phone.

Derek’s head dips, he smiles privately, “Sure.”

Stiles swears he can hear the world’s longest UGH from down the street. Derek used to be strictly against this kind of talk in front of the others. But he’s a person and is capable of change, of progression. Of growth. How about that?


End file.
